Forum Higher Ed & Training Forum: Re: Communities of practice

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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> Why is this?

Because tech-heads rule!

Seriously, I think this is a normal trend within other e-learning communities as well. For instance, the .LRN community is very active within its technical communities. It is not so common to get educational people asking questions or sharing experiences there.

Although, not long ago I saw a presentation by Mr. Moodle at the US MoodleMoot 2006 and he also mentioned that at the back in 2003 -when Moodle.org started, most of the queries and postings in the forum where technical people trying to get Moodle to work. It took a little while for teachers and educators to start sharing their thoughts in the community. Today, the composition of the Moodle.org mob is 50+% teachers.

So it might be a matter of maturity?

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Michael Feldstein

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I agree with Ernie; it's probably a matter of maturity. Online communities are notoriously hard to start, and educators tend to be much less accustomed to them than techies.

If you aren't seeing any uptick in educator participation a year from now, then you should worry. In the meantime, just keep doing what you're doing. I suspect they'll come.

Posted by Michael Feldstein

By: Robyn Philip

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Hi Michael and Ernie,

Yes, I think this community will grow. Should we do a LAMS vote on that?! :)

When you create a 'community' in an educational online course, if you want discussion on a forum then you give students an assessment that requires them to use it. Otherwise it is hit and miss - depending on a number of factors, particularly the nature of the student group and their orientation to the course. Also if people don't know one another, naturally they are more hesitant to share and put ideas out there.

I'm sure this community will develop because there are so many good things happening out there - teachers can be so creative. The simplicity of the technology is key I think.

Wenger (1998) says that a community of practice is more than just a network. It defines itself by three things:

http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml

*** ‘What it is about – its joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members;

*** How it functions - mutual engagement that binds members together into a social entity; and

*** What capability it has produced – the shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artifacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time.’

Posted by Robyn Philip

By: Frances Bell

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It is quite timely that this discussion has popped up because I have been thinking of commenting on this myself.
I am a facilitator for the CABWEB portal that hosts the HELP (Higher Education Learning Professionals) network and the JILID community ( a staff and student space that aims to build a global network of people who are interested in the research and collaboration on intercultural aspects of learning and the design of educational media.)
We launched in January 2005, and have grown steadily since then. I agree with the comment about the growth and change of the Moodle community (where I am a moderately active non-developer member). One of our dissemination strategies has been to work with other networks sharing or hosting discussion events and this seems to have been productive in terms of attracting members.
I know that some of our HELP members would be very interested in LAMS, and so I have a proposition to put to you. We have two upcoming discussion events scheduled (and one just finishing) but we do have some space in May/June.
Someone from LAMS would be most welcome to facilitate a 2 week discussion on LAMS. The deal is
1. Suggest a title that we post on our calendar.
2. About two weeks before you provide a 'trigger' for the discussion event - that could be a paper slide show or some multimedia resources that would interest potential participants.
3. CABWEB and event leaders publicise the event in suitable places, including our HELP news forum.
4. We set up a forum that is visble but inactive prior to the agreed date, directing people to HELP Social Forum if they wish to get started sooner.
5. Facilitator posts opening message, keeps a check on the discussion (maybe splitting long threads. etc)
6. Once discussion is over (may run slightly longer than 2 weeks but definitely curtail at three weeks), we archive the (now closed) discussion forum on HELP.

We have had quite a lot of activity on recent discussions considering our portal is a fairly clunky configuration of Moodle (no fancy customisation),
see this extract from our project report "A recent online discussion (on the Assessment of Online Discussion) attracted 87 participants who enrolled on the HELP network, and numerous other ‘guest’ accesses. 26 participants posted to the social forum. 30 posted to the actual discussion, contributing 65 posts over a 2 week period. Participants came from Europe, USA and Australia, and included PhD students, lecturers, schoolteachers and an international thinker in learning, Jan Visser. Our survey indicates that 69% of participants who responded to date found that postings caused them to reflect on their practice, and 85% intend to return to CABWEB in future."
In fact the high level of activity can be a turn off for users, and the challenge is showing them how to manage this with user profile settings, and subscribing , unsubscribing for forums. Some users just read emails or look at hte archives.
Anyway, how about it LAMS - do you want to come to tea at CABWEB HELP?

Posted by Frances Bell

By: Frances Bell

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Not much of a disseminator, am I? I forgot the url
CABWEB is at http://www.cabweb.net/portal and the HELP network is a space within this linked from the front page.
You can self-enrol from login page, or have a look around HELP as a guest.

Posted by Frances Bell

By: Robyn Philip

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Hi Frances and others interested in a few new online discussions,

This sounds a good idea. We are planning something similar to kick start discussions here at the LAMS community - with a paper to begin the thinking, then a two week discussion followed by a summary posting of the full discussion. This is likely to happen next month.

I'll contact you directly re the CABWEB suggestion.

Robyn

Posted by Robyn Philip

By: James Dalziel

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Snap!

Posted by James Dalziel

By: James Dalziel

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Hi Frances,

Thanks for the invitation. We've been talking about doing some similar things during 2006 for the LAMS Community, so we're keen to learn from your experience. Robyn will followup on this to work out timing, etc, to make sure we don't clash - but yes, someone from our education team will join you for tea at CABWEB HELP!

Also, once the discussion of LAMS at CABWEB HELP is finished and archived, I'd like to keep a mirror copy of it here as well (so LAMS Community members can find it locally and benefit from this discussion). Would this be okay?

Best wishes,

James

Posted by James Dalziel

By: Frances Bell

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Good, looking forward to hearing some suggested dates in May/June.
Let's talk about the technical issues of the mirror copy off- board. We did this with a Rock'n Roles event held on another server by backing up Moodle course and restoring it to CABWEB. Not sure what your technology is here.
The only issues are social and ethical. Take a look at our Ethos statement and Ethical Guidelines and we can talk about that too. DO you have a site policy here (I'll go and have a look)?

Posted by Frances Bell

By: Mark Lamontagne

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Yes ... it's true. I've conducted some research in the past on Communities of Practice. Educational CoPs always seem to have trouble generating interest. A colleague of mine debated thi with me for some time, and we came up with two somewhat disturbing propositions, which can, in part explain this lack of participation.

1. We debated whether or not education is a discipline. If not, it would be difficult to sustain interest in participation. We thought it could be more of an application of other discipline. Of course, we are only postulating.

2. Academic pursuits tend to be personal, to the point of being selfish. Individuals want to be published. Individuals often ask 'what's in it for me'. If I do more work, I don't get any more money. This selfish outlook towards their (our) profession makes it difficult to stimulate a vibrant CoP.

Any thoughts on these two somewhat disturbing ideas?

Posted by Mark Lamontagne

By: James Dalziel

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Hi Mark,

Thanks for the thoughts. Regarding the first point, my sense is that K-12 school educators think of themselves usually first as educators, then second as specialists in their disciplines; whereas in higher education, it is often the other way around (although noting that those working in e-learning and academic support in higher education often think of education as their discipline!). So although it may be hard to sustain general educational communities of practice with discipline experts in higher education, my sense is that there are still many others who could be hoped to participate. I think the Moodle community illustrates that online educators communities can work at scale.

A related issue is that when you look at the raw numbers of postings in online education communities, many of them are technical - this is true of Moodle, Sakai and LAMS. Is this just a natural outcome of the development needs, or is there more to this?

Regarding the second point, again my sense is that while this may be true of some, there are others who are happy to contribute for altruistic reasons. My sense is that the biggest limiting factor is time - every educator I know is so busy, it is hard to find time for "extra" tasks like participating in online communities.

As the education side of the LAMS Community has been somewhat quieter over the past month or two, I'm keen to hear any thoughts on his general issue, and whether there is anything we can do to foster further discussion.

Posted by James Dalziel

By: Robyn Philip

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Hi,

I think too in these sorts of communities, from the educational point of view, there is a lot more reading than posting.

In the technical area people have specific issues or difficulties that need instant resolution, and the community is a good place to take questions in order to find an answer.

Educational questions, however, can be very broad and may never have an answer, or be debated for decades. So there is not the urgency to respond - maybe this is a contributing factor to the different pace of discussion or rate of posting. ??

Posted by Robyn Philip